Panda jaw evolved for bamboo, according reports in ScienceDaily and University of Turku (UTU) Press Release 9 July 2021 and Scientific Reports, 9 July 2021, doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-93808-2. When pandas eat bamboo stems they first use their premolar teeth to peel off the outer layer which contains harmful chemicals and abrasive crystals. Then they grind up […]
How big is a mega shark? Really huge, according to reports in ScienceDaily 3 September 2020, SciTech Daily 4 September 2020 and Scientific Reports, 3 September 2020; doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-71387-y. Because sharks have a skeleton made of cartilage, rather than bone, fossils of whole sharks are very rare, so it is difficult to estimate their exact […]
More “Hobbit” bones found, as reported in Nature vol 437, p1012, 13 October 2005. Scientists excavating a cave on the Island of Flores in Indonesia have found a jaw bone, two arm bones and a shin bone that belong to Homo floresiensi. The new jaw is very similar to the first jaw in that it […]
Ever since the bones nicknamed the Hobbits and scientifically named Homo floresiensis were found in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores anthropologists have argued about whether they were diseased dwarf humans or some kind of primitive human ancestor. Debbie Argue, an Anthropologist at Australian National University, and colleagues have carried out a study […]
Half the world species catalogued, according to ABC (Australia) News, 9 April 2007, which reports: “Scientists working on a catalogue of every known kind of living organism have reached the milestone of having catalogued one million species. The project is being led by experts at Reading University in Britain and the Smithsonian National Museum in […]
Hairy crab found, according to reports in BBC News, and news@nature and ScienceNOW 8 March 2006. A crab that looks like a “cross between a gorilla and a lobster” has been found living near a hydrothermal vent at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean 1,500km (900miles) south of Easter Island. The white crab is 15cm […]
Jurassic Park dino found, according to reports in BBC News and ScienceDaily 2 May 2017 and PeerJ, 2017; 5: e3217 DOI: 10.7717/peerj.3217. Philip Mannion of Imperial College London and colleagues in France have studied a dinosaur fossil that has been languishing in a storage crate in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, […]
Dinosaurs were British, according to a BBC News article about dinosaur evolution which begins: “The first dinosaurs may have originated in the Northern Hemisphere, possibly in an area that is now Britain”. (23 March 2017). The article refers to a new study of dinosaur classification also reported in Nature News and ScienceDaily 22 March 2017, […]
“The earliest case of systematic naming occurred about 6,000 years ago when God brought all his newly fashioned creatures to Adam to see what he would call them (Genesis 2:19).” J. L. Heilbron, “Coming to Terms”, Nature, vol. 415, p585, 7 Feb 2002. Heilbron is from Worcester College, Oxford UK. Editorial Comment: The intriguing thing […]
“Become immortal” proclaims an advertisement from the Australian Museum included with the Autumn 2000 edition of their magazine Nature Australia. For $5000 the museum will name a newly discovered invertebrate animal after you. Editorial Comment: Obviously, the museum does not expect the bug to evolve or they could be sued for false advertising. Were you […]